The charming warmth of Muneyi’s soundscape

In person, Muneyi exudes a charm as warm as his music, and possesses an inexplicably funny bone that somehow goes directly against the subject matter he writes about in his songs.

The singer, songwriter and instrumentalist, who received this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Music award, has the type of deadpan humour that tends to go over many people’s heads at the best of times.

He responded with the word “delusion” to a question about what keeps him grounded in the city — and it is this trait that makes talking to him over the phone on the second last day of May a breeze. 

He answers questions with a delicateness and a thoughtfulness that is becoming rare in this increasingly neoliberal, post-Covid-19 state, which makes him an ace human being.

At the University of Johannesburg, where he studied towards a degree in film, Muneyi was “playing guitar” and for all intents and purposes a musician. But he’d promised himself to sort out his academics before diving headfirst into the art.

Subconsciously, Muneyi knew that music was going to be the main vehicle to advance his dreams, but as is the case for many up-and-comers, he had no idea how that was going to be possible.

Before going to UJ, he had dropped out of the University of Venda and lived with a full-time musician for a year.

“He was earning a living from music and the music business. It was enough for me to believe that, hey, this is something that I could live off,” he said.

In 2019, while working for a photographer and videographer, the opportunity presented itself when a small number of musicians signed up for a jam session at J’Something’s former restaurant in Time Square, Pretoria.

He hopped on stage, fully confident because of the catalogue of songs he had already written. He calls it “a moment of discovery in a Disney movie.”

When he got off, one of the musicians he’d been jamming with dared him to put out music. 

“I took that really seriously. I think it was around May 2019,” he said.

Muneyi went to Simz Kulla of The Muffinz with money that he’d saved up and a loan he’d taken, and asked for assistance with making a song.

“I went to his studio, recorded a guide, then he produced the song. I remember taking the rest of the loan and deciding that I’m going to [the National Arts Festival in Makhanda]. Later that year, Afropunk put out a call for battle of the bands. Then I entered with my friends.” 

His “friends” just happened to be The Muffinz, and they won that year’s competition alongside Soweto’s Shameless.

From doing gigs for R750 to landing a spot on this big stage smack in the middle of Joburg — at the same festival as Solange, Miguel and fellow traveller Zoë Modiga — the moment felt like a confirmation of sorts for his dreams.

The Afropunk moment also came with artist empowerment workshops, which gave him a great foundation to start thinking about how his future as an independent musician would pan out. 

“I’ve always bet on myself, even when I was unaware that I was betting on myself. So, it felt like, yo, if you do something, something happens, so I leaned very much into that,” he said. 

In January 2020, he was offered his first well-paying gig in Cape Town and has never looked back.

While there, talk of an impending pandemic was doing the rounds. He returned to Joburg and played a gig at his alma mater on February 29, his last for a long while.

During lockdown he perfected his “very intense cooking skills,” fell for “the banana bread propaganda” and started working towards his debut album, Makhulu.

“I had no sense of reality. I’m so good at detaching,” he admits. 

With only one song released, Muneyi started working towards a full body of work. Still, the process of his first song taught him what it is that he likes, and how to listen to his natural instinct.

He made a Back-a-Buddy account on the first day of lockdown and managed to raise about R30,000. A friend’s friend offered to donate two days’ worth of studio time. Muneyi alerted the band, and they hit the studio when restrictions were eased.

The product is a lush soundscape, equal parts intense and playful, with songs about his grandmother, his experience with heartbreak, and his identity as a black, queer man in conservative SA. 

Growing up in Tshilapfeni, Venda, a place he says haunts his sound, and “the only place with a sonic identity that isn’t as dynamic as where I live now.”

He says: “The city has too many sounds and too many places that are ever-changing. Even the language is ever-changing. Whereas the village is slow, and the songs are the same, and they have meaning, and they have function. So, it’s easy to stay grounded within that,” he said.

“For me, singing in my own language is not a political stance. There are people that have those narratives. I’m not that passionate maybe, and that’s OK.

“It’s first, me feeling that I care about this language, and I care about its preservation, and it being archived — especially being a minority language in this country.

“Second, I want to be fully heard as a person when I express myself. I find that my [English] vocabulary might be limited for certain subjects that I want to express myself in, or maybe there isn’t a context for that [subject matter], so I’m not maybe being heard as well as I’d like to be.”

Conversely, with English, he’s able to “meet everyone exactly where I am.”

He continues: “I’ve realised also that with some of the songs that I write, I really want the person who inspired me to maybe hear it, and for the greater community to hear it. It’s also important as a creative, as a business expansion tool, to make art that will bring you closer to money.” 

One album, two EPs later and with recognition from one of the country’s foremost art benefactors, Muneyi is ready to expand beyond the African continent.

“The next step is, what do I stand for outside personal beliefs and things I’ve engaged with — what do I actually stand for as a person?

“I’m working towards making a project for my homeland, Venda, but looking at it as a Bantustan and how the Venda people didn’t see it as segregation, but as being empowered to be independent, and they really fought for it to remain that way.

“There was beauty in it, but there was also so much f*****d up s**t that happened in that space as well,” Muneyi said.